The Hipster is otherwise known as the designer or creative genius, the Hustler the voice of reason – “is it something our partners and clients want?” but these days it’s the Hacker that is usually the most highly prized – not to mention highly paid – member of a new start-up.

The Hacker is described as “resembling MacGyver with their ability to wield various lines of code or programing languages, you’ll get dizzy trying to keep up with their keystrokes.” A coding genius who writes back end for fun and understands the difference between C++, Java, Python and Ruby on Rails is worth his or her weight in gold but outside of the coder community not much is known about what a good coder / hacker does, let alone how they do it.

Two South African born, London based coding evangelists are helping to demystify some of the work that hackers do by creating an inspired community where hackers can share, discuss, evaluate and test code amongst themselves, without being restricted to private company chat rooms.

Gitter founders Andrew Newdigate & Mike Bartlett in their East London offices; photo courtesy of Gitter

Slack has changed the modus operandi of a lot of small companies and enabled founders and their teams to communicate intensively and privately, but unlike Slack Gitter is open and available for anybody to connect to anybody similarly to Skype or
LinkedIn and is focused on connecting developer communities as opposed to team collaboration. The coding eco-system is an intensely collaborative one and by giving hackers from different companies the chance to communicate openly with one another childhood friends and Gitter founders Mike Bartlett and Andrew Newdigate believe they have also created an exciting knowledge sharing business model.

Gitter, supported by Amazon Web Services, hosts over 35,000 chatrooms and has amassed more than 250k registered users since launch who have exchanged more than 20 million messages between them. The site usually receives more than 600k visits each month. Mike and Andrew estimate that there are between 20-40 million part or full time coders (the figure would be significantly larger if you include network engineers says Mike) working on projects across the world.

Gitter allows users to easily share and discuss code from Github, the code repository hosting service which has more than 11m users with 30m visitors every month. Gitter is Github’s unofficial chat room. These are exciting times for chatrooms; Atlassian, owner of Slack competitor Hipchat is raising $462m in the last big tech IPO of 2015; Slack itself raised $160m earlier this year which gives the company a valuation of $2.76bn.

Tim Berners Lee, the Englishman credited with inventing the world wide web has been known to trawl Gitter chatrooms dispensing advice and answering questions on its future and its supporting technologies as part of his role at the Web Standards Body; the biggest trending topic right now is
Apple’s release of its new programming language, SWIFT and its more recent decision to make the language completely open source has been pretty well received so far, says Andrew. Mike believes that “community is the new colleague”. Gitter often experiences its biggest spikes in usage at conferences for example when there is a high level of interaction and discussion and ideas are being swapped around and developed.